New York has been paid homage in a thousand and one forms, but pictures have always shown its truth. Richard Renaldi Manhattan Sunday is the latest example.

Featuring photographs taken in Manhattan between midnight on Saturday and noon on Sunday, Manhattan Sunday is an homage to New York’s nightlife and a celebration of New York as palimpsest onto which millions of people project their ideal and imaginary lives. Richard Renaldi’s visual observations are rooted in the home he found himself, in “the mystery and abandonment of the club, the nightscape, and then finally daybreak, each offering a transformation of Manhattan from the known world into a dreamscape of characters acting out their fantasies on a grand stage.”

Richard Renaldi (born in Chicago, 1968) graduated from New York University with a BFA in photography in 1990. Manhattan Sunday (Aperture, 2016) is the fourth body of Renaldi’s work published in book form, following Figure and Ground (Aperture, 2006), Fall River Boys (2009), and Touching Strangers (Aperture, 2014). In 2015, he was named a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Photography.

The gallery by the Aperture Foundation will be on exhibit at the Aperture bookstore on Friday. Opening reception will run from 6 to 8pm. For those who can’t make the reception, Renaldi’s photographs will be on view until July 27th.

The Aperture Foundation is catering to the masses this summer, inviting anyone with some love behind the lens to submit their photographs. With no theme but the entries themselves, this July event promises to be quite ubiquitous. Executive Director Chris Boot will select the photos that will be exhibited.

Interest in photography has exploded. The world no longer divides between producers and consumers of photographs—we’re all photographers. With the Aperture Summer Open, we want to create an inclusive experience that explores photographic possibility and makes a statement about the character of the medium now.

Just catching up on our photography magazines and the cover of the Fall edition of Aperture heralded a nice piece on Clare Strand.

Over the last ten years, dissatisfied with the often complacent values of the photography world, Clare Strand has assembled a body of work that is both subversive and celebratory in its approach to photographic conventions. During this period Strand’s art has developed through a series of increasingly interesting and unique projects that have explored various photographic genres, from Victorian portraiture to crime scene and forensic photography. In these series she has dwelt on the oddity of photography’s strange backwaters, its utilitarian functions and its infiltration of every corner of our lives, to make us question the value and complex meanings of photographic images. This might be simply quirky and strange, but in Strand’s work it is resolved through photographs of incredible quality and genuine originality.

Over 1400 Paul Strand images from the Aperture Foundation are now to be held by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, making for the largest standalone collection of Paul Strand’s work in the world.

In an effort to become the world’s most important repository for the work of the photographer Paul Strand, the Philadelphia Museum of Art announced on Wednesday that it is well on its way to acquiring Strand’s entire output – a chronicle of his six-decade career.

It was Philadelphia that has had the strongest ties to Strand and his work ever since 1971, when Michael E. Hoffman, adjunct curator of photographer at the museum who was also executor of Strand’s estate and a former director of the Aperture Foundation, organized the first major Strand retrospective since 1945. In 1972 Strand gave the museum one of his most important early platinum prints, "City Hall Park, New York,” from 1915 along with six other works and museum bought 10 other prints including "The Family, Luzzara, Italy” from 1953. These acquisitions were followed by other purchases and gifts from the artist’s widow and in 1980 the artist’s estate gave the entire contents of the retrospective – nearly 500 prints – to the museum.

For Aperture, it’s a happy ending and one that will help support its programs. "It’s sort of a miracle that one institution will become home to virtually everything Strand,” said Mr. Garcia de Oteyza.

An ambitious exhibition unfolds at the Aperture Foundation gallery in Chelsea. Photos, books, portfolios and a film make for a visual feast. Covering a multi-year trip during the 30’s to Mexico by noted photographer Paul Strand, the images are nuanced, varied and well executed. Of special note are a series of photos labeled “Near Satillo” that are sprinkled throughout the exhibit. These are striking landscape photos that reach out to the viewer with their glowing beauty.

Interesting, but only occasionally exceptional (like the photo above), are the enigmatic, shadowy pictures of the native Mexicans. The film “Redes” is a nice bit of labor propaganda by the then socialist Mexican government that is very well photographed, as are the film stills by Ned Scott.

Strand first visited Mexico in 1932 at the invitation of Carlos Chavez, the eminent Mexican composer and conductor, having developed a fervent commitment to "straight photography"-photographs intended to capture life realistically and objectively, without manipulation. He was eager to put his beliefs into practice in Mexico, then a country undergoing profound cultural and political change. Strand’s sojourn in Mexico, during which he not only produced his own work but was also appointed the Director of the Department of Photography and Film by the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education, was a time of great creative renewal for the artist-one of intense productivity, and the development of a method of working that would become the foundation of his subsequent endeavors: collective portraits of other lands. Through his extensive travels through Mexico’s rural areas, Strand assembled the startling portraits of rural Mexican men, woman, and children that form the heart of the book and exhibition, along with breathtaking landscapes, baroque churches, and photographs of religious iconography.

At Aperture in Chelsea through April 1 is “No Singing Allowed: Flamenco and Photography”.

Whether as social phenomenon or musical expression, flamenco has been of enduring interest and inspiration to photographers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. While some photographers from outside of Spain went in search of it or encountered it by chance, to others flamenco and its practitioners are an essential, if not innate, aspect of their cultural heritage and their photographic work. This artistic form—also considered a way of life or being—has generated fascination in cultured urban circles, remaining one of the most secret, mysterious, and seductive manifestations of twentieth-century European popular art.

Actually two exhibits produced jointly with Insitituto Cervantes, “No Singing”, as displayed at Aperture’s gallery, is much more powerful than first imagined. Given the dramatic subject matter and the use of multiple artists both known and unknown, the exhibit succeeds on a number of levels …especially the black and white prints.

Favorites included images by Man Ray, Brassai, Saura and Bonnard. The most impressive to us was a village center dancer focused shot placed against industrial smokestacks in the background … “Celebration” by Catala Roca Francesc. The composition and mix of tones was impressive.

Now on view through April 1 at Aperture Gallery in NYC is a muti-decade survey of photographs with the unusual topic of flamenco dancing.

We were in San Miguel Allende, Mexico a number of years ago at a small cafe, “Magritte”, where they presented flamenco dancing, even at lunch hour, in a small 10 table room. To watch the drama of this dancing in such a confined space was to appreciate the intricacy and power of this historic folk art form. As evidenced by these images, portraits of the dancers lend themselves easily to photography.

Whether as social phenomenon or musical expression, flamenco has been of enduring interest and inspiration to photographers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. While some photographers from outside of Spain went in search of it or encountered it by chance, to others flamenco and its practitioners are an essential, if not innate, aspect of their cultural heritage and their photographic work. This artistic form—also considered a way of life or being—has generated fascination in cultured urban circles, remaining one of the most secret, mysterious, and seductive manifestations of twentieth-century European popular art. Marginalized and ostracized, the world of flamenco took root in an economically backward region of southern Europe, culturally peripheral and marked by a history of authoritarianism and local despotisms. This exhibition of more than one hundred and fifty years of images, frequently taken by foreigners rather than Spaniards, is an extensive survey of how photographers of different eras have approached the universe of flamenco, whether documenting the dance itself, gestures that recall it, or the culture that is developed around it.

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